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The Next Generation
Thomas Daniell
The first-prize winning project by Yuichi Nakada focused on a huge, rough model. Sketches made directly on the partition walls, with small notches for plastic people.
The first-prize winning project by Yuichi Nakada focused on a huge, rough model.
Sketches made directly on the partition walls, with small notches for plastic people.
This year saw the fourth time that the Sendai Design League (a group of local architects and educators) has collected together the best final-year design projects by architecture students from across Japan. They are put on display at the Sendai Mediatheque, where a jury of professionals selects the top three by deliberating live in front of an audience. It's an extraordinary scene, inexplicably able to draw huge crowds -- mostly other architecture students, of course, but also many members of the general public and the mainstream press. This year saw a record attendance of about 3,000 people.

The event is called the Sotsugyo-sekkei Nihon-ichi Ketteisen, which the organizers translate as "Architectural and Urban Design Graduation Championship Series." A ketteisen is a tournament or playoff (the same word is used for tennis or sumo), suggesting that this is a real-time sport, complete with cheering, tears, groupies, tension, and genuine surprises.

The organizing committee consisted of architect Hitoshi Abe, critic and historian Taro Igarashi, architectural planner Yasuaki Onoda, architect Masayoshi Takeuchi of Mikan, Osamu Tsukihashi from the Tohoku Institute of Technology, and Tohru Horiguchi and Masashige Motoe from Tohoku University. Each year, a different guest is invited to lead the jury; past chief jurors include Toyo Ito (architect of the Sendai Mediatheque) and Osamu Ishiyama (an architect and Waseda University professor), but this time it was Terunobu Fujimori (an architectural historian who over the last decade has reinvented himself as an amateur architect).

Universities from around the country contributed projects that were culled down to a pool of 374 entrants. After a day of extended, often humorous, public debates the jury settled on a first, second, and third place, along with two honorable mentions.

The results, together with highlights of the tournament itself, were then turned into an exhibition at Gallery MA (somewhat awkwardly entitled "The Best of Graduation Works 2006 in Nippon"). The lower gallery space contained the five selected projects, with models and panels arranged by the designers themselves, interposed with comments from the jury and photos of the scene at the Mediatheque. On the upper level, almost every project entered was available for view. They were placed in bins of identically sized plastic portfolios that allowed them to be flipped through easily. The gallery space looked like a secondhand record store with furniture made of blue expanded polystyrene. Against the back wall was a large video projection of the tournament itself.

The first-prize winning project by Yuichi Nakada focused on a huge, rough model crowded with miniature plastic people that also spilled out across the floor, suggesting he was less interested in the built form than in what the people do around it. Rather than placing presentation drawings on the partition walls provided, he sketched directly on them, and notched out small spaces for more of the same figurines to inhabit. Second-prize winner Kota Segawa used simple modular geometries in clusters that recall the experiments of the 1960s Metabolists, yet also swarming with the same plastic figurines. Third-prize winner Maki Onishi translated a diagram of overlapping curves into an irregular web of curvilinear buildings and courtyards -- and more of the same little people. The honorable mention design by Hiroyasu Miyoshi was also a proposal for a system of overlapping linear buildings and courtyards, but with a life-size installation that demonstrated some of the materials and textures being proposed. The other honorable mention design, by Yu Toida, seemed to be less a building than an obscure statement on phenomenology and perception.

There was a surprising lack of computer graphics among the winning projects, and a reassuring coarseness to the drawings and models. No doubt the selection process was heavily influenced by Fujimori, who has always favored the hand-drawn, hand-made, and self-built. Given the current tendency in architecture toward complex sculptural shapes assembled with implausible precision, whether or not the five graduates honored here go on to become major figures in the Japanese architecture world is less important than the statement being made by their selection.
Kota Segawa
Maki Onishi
Hiroyasu MiyoshiAll the other entries were placed in bins of identically sized plastic portfolios
above: Second-prize winner Kota Segawa used simple modular geometries in clusters that recall Metabolist designs.
below: Third-prize winner Maki Onishi made an irregular web of curvilinear buildings and courtyards.
Like 

                          watching a never-ending sunset
above: The honorable mention design by Hiroyasu Miyoshi also used overlapping linear buildings and courtyards.
below: All the other entries were placed in bins of identically sized plastic portfolios.
All photos by Thomas Daniell
Architectural and Urban Design Graduation Championship Series
Sendai Mediatheque / http://prj.smt.jp/~gakuseikaigi/
11-15 March 2006 (Jury: 13 March)
The Best of Graduation Works 2006 in Nippon
Gallery MA / http://www.toto.co.jp/gallerma/ex060822/index.htm
22-31 August 2006